The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Thursday, May 07, 2015

Hey Everybody! Saudi Arabia & Turkey Just Made Us Another Sh*t Sandwich in the Middle East!

The big news today is that Saudi Arabia and Turkey are
clubbing together to overthrow the Assad regime.

Actually, this is old news.What happened today is that the news embargo was lifted and the AP’s
Desmond Butler got to print the scoop.

It was apparent for a couple weeks that something along
these lines was going to drop.

As I put it on Twitter on April 28, “Something is cooking
in the kitchen”.

Let me explain, because it’s an interesting illustration of
how the “open source” parsing thingamajig works, in kind of a backward way.

All of a sudden, starting around April 20, there were
flurries of declarations from pundits and journos that Assad was going down.

Problem was, many of these pundits and journos were not the
sort of people one would expect to have knowledge of the inner workings of the
Assad regime (notoriously opaque) or the actual conditions on the battlefield
(fragmented, confusing, very dangerous to investigate, and best understood by the Assad forces, not the countries blindly arming and funding proxies and
grifters inside Syria).

These experts, on the other hand, seemed to be experts at
access reporting and consulting with foreign policy decisionmakers in the US
and the Gulf Countries.In other words,
they’re in the “champagne hopes and caviar dreams” business of reporting elite
intentions and aspirations as facts.

Today, when the AP report appeared, I tweeted “and the dish is coming out of the
kitchen. Will be interesting to see what pundits/media outlets in US endorse
KSA/TK strategy.”

The Tweetgods
were smiling on me, or at least sniggering nastily, since a couple minutes
later this came over the wire, retweet of a humblebrag from Charles Lister of
Brookings Doha:

I had a good
time snarking on this—and Lister’s apparent desire to advertise that Brookings
Doha is an eager and able mouthpiece for the GCC ("Did you see my piece? FP!")--because, quite frankly, Assad
isn’t losing yet.

But Saudi Arabia and
Turkey dearly want to assert that meme (if not the more accurate "once our brilliant scheme is deployed there is absolutely NO WAY Assad can survive BWAHAHAHA!!!") into the Middle East narrative,
especially I would guess in the hope that Iran, for the sake of its precious
nuclear deal, reduces its aid to Assad.

So it’s hard to
see all of these articles as much more than hopeful stenography (I should say
that Josh Landis, a genuine Syria expert, does see genuine problems for Assad
mainly, I guess, because he saw the KSA/Turkey alliance coming).

Of course, as
anyone should be able to tell you, the overt Turkish assistance to the rebels
has been going on for a while, culminating in the capture of Idlib with the
assistance of Turkish artillery and advisers and Ankara’s midwifing of an
Islamist-heavy rebel alliance.By a
funny coincidence, this ostensibly indigenous triumph of rebel arms gives the
anti-Assad forces a rest, recuperation, resupply, and remanning haven right on
the Turkish border.

The only real
question remaining is whether the US has greenlit this escapade, or whether
impatient local powers Saudi Arabia and Turkey have “slipped the leash”.

I tend to think
the US is on board, but is loath to openly back the effort since it is now
almost entirely an Islamist play with very few of our adored
secular/democratic/civil society forces in evidence.Apparently, the optics, if not the reality,
of the US working with Al Qaeda (or whatever Islamist force has repackaged
itself as Al Qaeda) makes Uncle Sam gag.

But Sam Power
appeared on Charlie Rose to declare, We gotta take care of Assad first, then
IS.I think that’s the tell that the US
is good with the current strategy even though democracy is clearly out the
window and the anti-Assad struggle is now repackaged not only as a sectarian
struggle but, at least according to a commentator on Al Jazeera, one in which
wholesale slaughter of Alawite civilians is OK.

Sam might need
an extra glass of Chablis to wash that one down.

The other
interesting element is the Israeli factor.Israel has begun giving overt assistance to Islamists in Syria’s south,
again with the idea of creating a useful haven.

And a couple
days ago, a Saudi jetliner landed in Tel Aviv, ostensibly because of mechanical
issues.But it’s rumored the Saudi crown
prince was on board, and my guess is it was easier to fly a bunch of Saudis to
Israel to discuss Syria business than it was to get Israel’s general
staff into Saudi Arabia to discuss the nuts and bolts of the upcoming campaign.

Then it’s
Everybody on board?Let’s unleash AP!

Even if a
formal no-fly zone isn’t declared, maybe Israel will pitch in and degrade
Syria’s air defenses and maybe take out the helicopters Assad uses extensively
to shuttle troops to and fro and drop barrel bombs.

So, yeah, if
all goes as planned, Assad’s in trouble.He loses mobility, he can’t juggle his exhausted troops to block
coordinated, simultaneous rebel advances from north and south, the Saudi
bribe-o-matic machine is finally able to bag some genuine high level defectors,
and Assad gets on--or almost gets on--a plane for Russia.

Just like
Libya!Success!

But remember,
this is the same crew that is screwing up Yemen and I am not sure that Russia,
Iran, and the PRC will respond to the determined public and private signalling
from the anti-Assad coalition and decide to pull the plug on him.

Also bear in
mind, after a month of bombing that has become pointless to the point that
every sortie is a war crime against Yemen’s immiserated civilians, Saudi Arabia
has yet to show the stones to send in ground troops and restore some semblance
of order.So even if the Syria scheme
works and the jihadists can drive Assad out of Syria by themselves, the will and ability of Saudi Arabia and Turkey to go into Syria and
slug it out with the victorious Islamist factions to put some kind of effective
government in place in Damascus seems pretty dubious.

All in all, I
am not confident that the combined wisdom of the world’s most reactionary
theocracy and a reckless neo-Ottoman freebooter will deliver anything other
than a failed state in Syria.

Like I said,
Think Libya!

Maybe President
Obama has decided, Let the Middle East go to hell and Hillary.I'm off to Asia!

Below in reverse
order are my tweets over the last couple weeks.Not just boasting here.It’s
useful in retrospect to see how and through what channels these policy
decisions emerge prior to the formal unveiling. Also includes some serious & informed reports by Landis, Lund, etc.

May 7, 2015

Kinda
interesting. That boomlet of "Assad is losing" articles should have
been billed as "KSA/TK leak strategy to friendly thinktanks".

"Washington
needs to exercise total control over who gets what from regional powers to the
Syrian opposition."

Hof sounds like "expert on wishful thinking about
Syria" rather than "Syria expert". Note assumption that Iran
will write off eastern Syria I take this as "I'm sure Iran will ditch
Assad in return for nuke deal" Lite

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